Atmospheric Science—PhD

Climate change. Air pollution. Emissions. Wild fires. The Atmospheric Science—PhD program provides opportunities to study cloud formation in our cloud chamber facility
or to learn the impacts of air pollutants emitted in North America and Europe at the
Pico Mountain Observatory in Portugal.

Measurements at Pico Mountain study the free atmosphere that is not directly affected
by the ocean, and to see pollution transport events originating in North America and
Europe. The station was developed to study the global impacts of human activities
on the atmosphere. It has proven valuable for learning about the effects of large
wild fires in North America and Siberia. Michigan Tech physics faculty are an integral
part of research at the observatory and collaborate with many universities and research
groups.

Our physics faculty concentrate their research efforts in Earth’s atmosphere by studying
ice in the atmosphere to faster-than-terminal fall speeds of raindrops, as part of
the PI cloud chamber group. The group has built the world’s largest cloud chamber,
the PI Chamber, which draws researchers and students alike to study the microphysics of clouds.

Links of Interest

Research Interests

Atmospheric Physics

Cloud Physics

Nucleation

Turbulence

Digital Holography

Graduate Researcher Spotlight

Fan Yan, 2017, Atmospheric Sciences PhD

Yan studied ice particles in our cloud facility. According to Yang, ice particles in atmospheric clouds play
an important role in determining cloud lifetime, precipitation, and radiation, which
is important for understanding weather and climate changes. Additional graduate research
can be found through our thesis and dissertations.

High speed video is used to investigate heterogeneous ice nucleation in supercooled
droplets resting on cold substrates under two different dynamic conditions: droplet
electrowetting and droplet vibration.